THE BALKAN CONFLICT was embedded into Dario Saric's consciousness from birth. He was born in 1994, during the height of the war, and grew up in basketball, where Serbs, Croats and Bosnians co-mingled in a basketball-obsessed region where cultural and national identity run deep.
After some background on geography and recent history, Saric showed a video of the 1990 Dinamo-Red Star riot in Belgrade, where fans of the Serbian and Croatian national soccer teams clashed a year prior to the armed conflict that killed approximately 140,000 and displaced 4 million people. To illustrate the human element of the conflict in more relatable terms, Saric then chronicled the bitterness that emerged on the Yugoslavian national team during the ensuing decade.
"Dario's [talk] was the most impactful," Covington says. "He spoke about everything that went on. You could tell it was a tad bit sensitive for him."